Browse Topics

Salvaging The Future

Michael Helm On The Virtues Of Junk

Practically, managing a salvage yard is a great way to make a living because there is so much waste in this culture. Fifteen years ago, I dropped out of corporate life and got into salvage — actually, it was called junk back then.

The Homeless

I was just rousted off the floor of Grand Central Station by two cops, one of each race. It didn’t occur to me to say, “But I’m waiting for the train to Poughkeepsie!”

Mister Duck

He is a Southern suburban white boy now all grown-up, born too late for Vietnam and not late enough for high-yield T-bills, so he is stuck somewhere, an underground movement of one. That suits him fine.

A Wyoming Myth

In January of 1966 an old Crow woman, tired of her age and the palsied chattering of her body, walked from Powder River all the way up Crazy Woman Creek into the Bighorns. She thought she would be as the original Crazy Woman, another Indian dying alone in the snow.

Another New Advancement Of Civilization

Editor’s Note

Friend Of The Sun

On Writing

Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.

What’s Eating Me

A Memoir

My mother never held a baby that way. Even when she was feeding my brother, he always somehow rested on her arm, never melted into her body. In New Hampshire, I finally said something to my brother about never having been treated that way when I was a baby. “No,” my brother said. “Our mother would have held us out there with a pair of tongs if she could have.”

From Conflict To Intimacy

An Interview With Danaan Parry

You and I and every human being I have met in any culture — we have all been conditioned to put a barrier between ourselves and other people, to stay safe. And it is that safety that creates most of the conflicts in the world. It’s that crazy paradoxical situation whereby if I stay safe from you in that way, I can make you the enemy, and we can go to war and kill one another. That kind of safety has to end — especially in this nuclear age. We have to make ourselves unsafe to one another personally and psychologically so that our planet can be safe.